True but possibly tangential anecdote: Night before last outside Spaceland I was revisiting a conversation with a friend about how 1992 remains my favorite year in music. It was a great time for my three favorite food groups – rock, power-pop and shoegaze – and no albums from any other year get dusted off more […]
The name of this song is “Cool Water,” but Angie Mattson’s sultry vocals seem to bring it to a boil. It’s representative of the more badass alt-country side of her sophomore album “Skeleton Arm,” released this week. The follow-up to the Michigan-bred singer-songwriter’s 2007 debut “Given to Sudden Panic and Noisy Retreat” finds Mattson dabbling […]
[Health’s sold-out show at the Echoplex on Tuesday night was, by all accounts, a smash. Buzz Bands LA contributor Rich Thomas posted an interview today on his Mining the Landfill:] By Rich Thomas A while back, I had the pleasure of spending an entire afternoon with the dudes in Health for a self-titled cover story. […]
File under: Appetite for touring. L.A. electro-funk band Spirit Animal (whom some of you might remember from the Buzz Bands LA holiday party in December) arrived a novel way to try to finance this summer’s tour behind their debut album “The Cost of Living.” Frontman Steve Cooper will make dinner for you. Provided, of course, […]
Ventura three-piece the Spires rarely veer from the Anglophile superhighway that seems to run right past Buzz Bands headquarters. Comparisons to Felt, the Velvet Underground, Robyn Hitchock and the Flying Nun catalog all apply, and on the forthcoming “Curved Space” – their fourth EP to go along with two full-lengths (including last year’s very good […]
Over the past few years, the Henry Clay People have progressed from party animals to scene stars to the rare band capable of making classic rock sound fresh and relevant. Their third album, “Somewhere on the Golden Coast,” comes out Tuesday on TBD Records (home to Radiohead and Autolux, among others), and any Silver Laker […]
When Sean Beavan isn’t in the studio making Really Big Rock Records (his credits include Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, System of a Down and Guns N’ Roses), he’s teaming up with his significant other on significantly another kind of music. The husband-wife torch-pop of 8mm features the sultry vocals of his wife, Juliette, who […]
This blog post brought to you in part (but only in part) by my nostalgia for the early 1990s, the last era you could hear a song like “Hayfever” on commercial FM radio: The Trashcan Sinatras have endured trials, tribulations and Glasgow’s weather for better than two decades now, their distinctly Scottish and abidingly soulful […]
If Tommy Walter didn’t have bad luck … well, he wouldn’t have those hard-luck stories he can tell about his first two albums. Walter, in his nom de tune Abandoned Pools, released two fine albums last decade. “Humanistic” came out in 2001, just before Extasy Records went belly-up. “Armed to the Teeth” followed in 2005, […]
A year and a half ago, fuzz-pop trio School of Seven Bells released “Alpinisms” and asked listeners to climb the hazy heights with them. Which we were happy to. Now Benjamin Curtis, the guitarist in the identical twin sandwich of Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, is back, having produced a sophomore album “Disconnect From Desire” (due […]
